Anyone for tennis?
Having chosen the career of tennis for his sons (well, technically they were allowed choose, but only between that and soccer, and they chose tennis) Jose drilled them as hard as he ever had, determined they would be the best. From sunrise to almost late afternoon they would have to practice, practice, practice and then spend the evening being browbeaten and lectured by the man who could do no wrong, and intended his sons should not be allowed to either. He would cure them of the weakness he saw in their eyes, little realising, or caring, that what he saw there was fear, fear of him, fear of disappointing him and inviting his anger. Even professional coaches he hired himself weren’t good enough to teach his boys, and Jose would regularly contradict them, running out from the house to dispense unwanted advice and orders.
However, the two boys did well in the sport, winning state championships when they were sixteen and fourteen respectively, but even this was not enough for Jose, who pushed and pushed as if he never believed his kids would push back. And they did. One day, Lyle just shouted at his taunting father “Why don’t you just shut up?” He received a broken nose for his trouble, and the promise that if he ever spoke to his father like that again, Jose would kill him. The double standard was almost funny: Jose could belittle and jeer and all but abuse his kids, but should they dare assert their manhood and stand up to him, they were for it. He had spent most of their lives trying to toughen them up, but was not okay with them turning that toughness on him. He saw it both as a betrayal and a challenge to his undisputed authority and supremacy in the family.
The boys would frequently lose it on the tennis court if things did not go their way, throwing down their racquets, stamping and screaming McEnroe-style, and the parents weren’t much better. The entire family was an unwelcome sight at most tournaments, despite the boys’ considerable talent, and an indication that trouble was to follow. Kitty in particular didn’t much care about rules if they went against her sons, would make her objections known at some histrionic volume, and Jose of course thought he knew better than the professionals.
When Lyle went to Princeton he found himself suddenly no longer a leading light, no longer the one others stood in awe of, no longer better than everyone else. He was just another arrogant rich kid who thought the world belonged to him, but on walking through the doors of the venerable college was swiftly disabused of this notion. The biggest wake-up call (or it should have been, to anyone else) was his suspension for a year after copying another student’s work for a test. Even his blustering, threatening father could not change the minds of the faculty, who gave Jose no more respect than they would the parent of any other student - here, Jose too for perhaps the first time was made to feel as if he were ordinary, and he did not like it - and the suspension stood. Lyle therefore left Princeton.
The matter was hushed up, and the family pretended Lyle was still at college, however eventually Jose had to find something for the boy to do, and so he set him to work at his new video company, LIVE, from which he had ousted Noel Bloom. But while he had been driven by his father mercilessly on the tennis court and even at the dinner table, Lyle had been brought up by his mother to understand he did not have to work, that things would be done for him, that he would never suffer academically, and this was the attitude he took into business. Not interested in working, he did as little as possible. Unpopular, lazy, inefficient, and no protection offered to him from the boss his father, he didn’t last long.
When he finally returned to Princeton, he found he had an acolyte. Donovan Goodreau was pulled in, completely under his spell, and they became great friends, Goodreau seeing Lyle as his svengali. He even did his homework and assignments for him, taking the place of Kitty, who now could no longer shield her son from the horror of having to actually do his own work. But like the few friends he cultivated over his life - more adherents really, disciples - Lyle either got bored with Donovan or just wanted to hurt him. He spread a rumour around Princeton that Goodreau was responsible for a series of petty thefts, and though his friend denied it, Lyle ordered him out, and back to New Jersey he went. Minus his wallet, which Lyle held up triumphantly, ready to go on a spending spree he could easily have afforded with his own money. But for Lyle Menendez, it wasn’t spending that was fun, it was spending someone else’s money without their permission. Theft, in other words. He was already well on the way to being a criminal.
“My brother’s a god. I worship the ground Lyle walks on.” - Erik Menendez
Erik Menendez
The contrast between the two brothers was startling. Perhaps because their father had had longer to “mould” his eldest son into the kind of man he believed he could and should be, Erik was left somewhat unbothered by the rampaging maniac attention of his father. Either as a result of this, or perhaps it was his nature, Erik was as dissimilar to his older brother as it was possible for two children to be. While people who met Lyle commented on his coldness, his detachedness, the blank stare in his eyes (the eyes of a killer?), cultivated no doubt by years of the pressure his father had heaped on his young shoulders, of the sparks that flew between them and, in reality, of his acceptance that his father’s way was the right one, Erik was far gentler and more, well, human. He rescued abandoned animals, wrote poetry and loved nature. He was, perhaps, everything Jose Menendez despised in a man, or a boy, and to some degree friends believed that Jose, having his heir in Lyle, did not care so much for Erik, and he was called “the throwaway child”.
It’s quite possible - though unproven - that Jose never even wanted a second child. Luckily it wasn’t a girl, as who knows what the ultimate chauvinist misogynist would have done with that hand, had he been dealt it? But all he really wanted was someone he could control and shape, another him, a legacy he could leave behind, something of himself to live on after, despite his arrogance he knew he would, he died. In this way Erik escaped the worst of the treatment, looked on as an afterthought by his brutal father, and allowed to live his life the way he wanted to. Mostly. This isn’t to say he was given anything like actual freedom, or exempted from the harsh discipline Jose meted out, but his father’s eyes were always first and foremost locked on his eldest son, and his younger child was able to fly somewhat below the radar.
While Jose cared little for him, Erik’s mother pampered him, doing his homework for him, helping him to cheat on exams and even forging a false ID for him when underage so that he could go drinking with his new girlfriend (she made one for her too). Initially worried about the boy’s sexual orientation - he was still playing with teddy bears and other stuffed animals up to his fourteenth year - Kitty did everything she could to encourage the relationship between Erik and Jan, and push it towards its inevitable result. At Calabasa High School Erik made his own friends but they noted that he had a dark, somewhat sadistic side to him. One who noticed but didn’t care, was in fact attracted to this side of Erik was the man who would become his best friend, Craig Cignarelli. A scion of the MGM dynasty, Cignarelli had the world on a string and he knew it. The word playboy might have been coined to describe him; easy-going, handsome, confident to a fault bordering on arrogance, and a lady’s man, he became all but Erik’s mentor.
Together they wrote the screenplay for “Friends” which would be referred to so frequently at the trial of the two brothers, and used as proof that Erik and Lyle had masterminded and then executed the killing of their parents, not on a whim, but as a cold and calculated plan to get their hands on their father’s money. It would be presented as a form of premeditation, evidence that their minds worked in this way, and that, far from being harmless fiction, it was in effect a confession for their future crime. Indeed, Cignarelli and Erik had often discussed how to get away with the perfect crime, though that crime was not always murder.
Erik and Cignarelli had a run in with a local gang, which resulted in trouble following them home. Jose, the tough man who took no s
hit from anyone, the consummate bully who believed himself better and stronger than any other man, who had destroyed careers and lives and marriages without a second thought, feared his boy getting on the wrong side of the criminal underworld, and also worried probably about Noel Bloom’s reported association with gangland figures, and uncharacteristically told Erik to drop it.